Review of Katie King, Networked Reenactments: Stories Transdisciplinary Knowledges Tell, Durham: Duke UP, 2011.

Rob Wilkie, The Digital Condition: Class and Culture in the Information Network, New York: Fordham UP, 2011.

Over the past year, faculty members in my interdisciplinary department at Georgia Tech responded to the request by an external review for improved descriptions of our programs and department. The process of strategic planning is inherited from the corporate world and is the most obvious way that academic institutions are being pressed to function better (i.e., more like corporations). My colleagues and I struggled to agree on the best description of our research and teaching, because we knew that the reputation and future configuration of the department were at stake. Recessionary university budgets meant that we had to be both accurate and persuasive in descriptions that would be read by various interest groups: our university colleagues; administrators, including our dean, provost, and president; former, current, and prospective students and their parents; employers of our graduates; the citizens and legislators of our state who underwrite part of the budget for our institution; and the various other funding agencies and donors who contribute to our research and curricular programs.

After considering what each faculty member does and relating it to the university’s recently issued strategic plan, we reached a consensus that our scholarship and curricular programs focus on culture and technology, and particularly on building and critiquing technologies, including technologies of representation. While agreeing on our core activities, however, we also recognized diverse affiliations with other disciplinary and interdisciplinary humanistic fields: rhetoric, literary criticism, creative writing, cinema studies, performance studies, and cultural studies of science and technology. Because it is impossible to be both universally transparent and cutting-edge, there are irresolvable, permanent tensions between our department’s general project and individual faculty members’ specific research; these tensions are reflected, furthermore, in the differences between our department’s configuration and those of similar departments in the state system and beyond.

Our experience of strategic planning represents what Katie King calls “networked reenactment” in building community-identity and embodies what Rob Wilkie describes as the necessary, if unpaid, labor to create culture. King’s and Wilkie’s respective books, Networked Reenactments: Stories Transdisciplinary Knowledges Tell and The Digital Condition: Class and Culture in the Information Network, both consider the economic forces affecting the creation, deployment, and consumption of technologies and related representations. Both books explain how macroeconomic processes affect scholarly work and undervalue it in the marketplace. Theoretically rigorous, these books are also highly pragmatic in recommending activism for social justice. Read more

Carol Colatrella
Georgia Institute of Technology
carol.colatrella@lcc.gatech.edu

In the next few months we will publishing Toni Morrison: An Ethical Poetics by Yvette Christiansë and I am reminded of the Contemporary American Fiction Class I took with Professor Jonathan Levin where I read Song of Solomon as a junior.

I unearthed my essay on Song of Solomon that I had long since forgotten. In it I stressed that Song of Solomon is a novel that stresses the importance that a traditional past has on a contemporary American. Morrison creates a novel that is filled with largely religious references that form a commentary on contemporary American society, which appears to be moving towards secularization. However, the main character, Milkman takes a journey that shows the reader that a contemporary individual cannot break with their religion any more than Milkman can break with his cultural and religious past because it is the past that completes him. Milkman takes a leap at the end of the novel in which he lives life to the fullest, because in that second between life and death, he is free. A beautiful and painful concept.

I think that Song of Solomon may be the only work I have read by Toni Morrison. There is a copy of Paradise sitting on a bookshelf. With our upcoming publication, I just might dust both off and immerse myself in the writings of Toni Morrison, with Professor Christiansë as my guide.

Katie Sweeney

Every season we look forward to the unique and quirky angles our authors take on great works of literature. From exploring the story of Lot’s wife leaving Sodom and Gomorrah to arguing that love is another form of technology. We at FUP believe that love is for the over-educated!

But what happens when love goes awry? When the very diction we use becomes explosive? With a cover that would make Mae West proud, literary and cultural critic Marjorie Garber invites readers to join her in a rigorous and exuberant exploration of language in Loaded Words.  What links the pieces included in this vibrant new collection is the author’s contention that all words are inescapably loaded—that is, highly charged, explosive, substantial, intoxicating, fruitful, and overbrimming—and that such loading is what makes language matter.

‘‘Would you like to take a walk?’’ may sound like an open question, but try it on (a) your dog, (b) a hothead in a bar, or (c) the person to whom you are about to propose marriage, and see how ‘‘loaded’’ this simple query can become.

Garber casts her keen eye on terms from knowledge, belief, madness, interruption, genius, and celebrity to humanities, general education, and academia. Included here are an array of stirring essays, from the title piece, with its demonstration of the importance of language to our thinking about the world; to the superb “Mad Lib,” on the concept of madness from Mad magazine to debates between Foucault and Derrida; to pieces on Shakespeare, “the most culturally loaded name of our time,” and the Renaissance.

What’s not to love? That you have to wait until April 2012 for Loaded Words to publish. I’ve included a sneak peek, but here are some Mad Libs to hold you over until then.

Staff Literature Picks

• Toni Morrison: An Ethical Poetics by Yvette Christianse (June 2012)
• Hidden: Reflections on Gay Life, AIDS, and Spiritual Desire by Richard Giannone (June 2012)
• Between Page & Screen: Remaking Literature Through Cinema and Cyberspace edited by Kiene Brillenburg Wurth (August 2012)

Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human, edited by Deborah Christie and Sarah Juliet Lauro, explores the zombie from many different points of view, the contributors look across history and across media. Though they represent various theoretical perspectives, the whole makes a cohesive argument: The zombie has not just evolved within narratives; it has evolved in a way that transforms narrative. This collection announces a new post-zombie, even before the boundaries of this rich and mysterious myth have been completely charted.

We must ask ourselves: Are zombies becoming more human, or are humans becoming more like zombies? If we are, might that resolve some of our uniquely humanist problems? Will the equalizing force of the zombie horde undergo gender trouble, identity politics, and disparities between the haves and the have-nots? Might we not all be better off dead?

Here’s a sneak peek at “And the Dead Shall Rise”.

-Ben Sicker

“I became interested in the way our culture felt the desperate need to represent 9/11 but also to ward off representations of 9/11. . . . From the beginning, you find strictures against photographing the site, but you will also find a vast number of photographs, even photographs of people taking photographs.”—Mark Redfield

Yesterday marked the tenth anniversary of 9/11. The terrorist attacks that day, did symbolic as well as literal damage. A trace of this cultural shock echoes in the American idiom “9/11”: a bare name-date conveying both a trauma (the unspeakable happened then) and a claim on our knowledge. In the first of the two interlinked essays making up The Rhetoric of Terror, Marc Redfield proposes the notion of “virtual trauma” to describe the cultural wound that this name-date both deflects and relays. Virtual trauma describes the shock of an event at once terribly real and utterly mediated. In consequence, a tormented self-reflexivity has tended to characterize representations of 9/11 in texts, discussions, and films, such as World Trade Center and United 93.

To read more about Marc Redfield and his thoughts on 9/11, visit Today at Brown.

To learn more about the book, you can listen to a podcast by Mark Redfield or watch a short video clip from the author.

Monday, November 8 at 6:30 PM
Co-Sponsored by Fordham University Press

TENEMENT MUSEUM
108 Orchard St
New York, 10002
(212) 431-0233


Sunday dinners, basement kitchens, and backyard gardens are everyday cultural practices long associated with Italian Americans, yet the public’s general perception of this group remains superficial and stereotypical at best. Cutting-age contributors to the field will reexamine these and other cultural expressions and help us rethink what we know about Italian Americans.

Nancy Carnevale is associate professor of history at Montclair State University and co-editor of the Critical Studies in Italian America series. Joseph Sciorra is associate director for Academic and Cultural Programs at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute at Queens College, CUNY and editor of Italian American Review , a bi-annual journal. Simone Cinotto teaches in the department of Italian studies at NYU.

For more information, please visit: WWW.TENEMENT.ORG

Cornelia Street Cafe
29 Cornelia St
New York, NY 10014

Luigi Bonaffini and Gil Fagiani, hosts:

Poets of the Italian Diaspora: from Latin America to Australia
A bilingual reading (Italian-English)

FROM THE FORTHCOMING ANTHOLOGY:

POETS OF THE ITALIAN DIASPORA: A Bilingual Anthology
(Fordham University Press)

Readers will include: Emelise Aleandri, Luigi Bonaffini, Peter Carravetta, Gaetano Cipolla, Gil Fagiani, Luigi Fontanella, Irene Marchigiani, Fiorentina Russo, Michael Palma, and Joseph Perricone.

For more information